Email Archiving – A Necessity for Business Success

Thanks to the Internet, email is the main
communication tool used by businesses to share confidential data and documents
and other types of important business information.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act requires businesses needs to secure email communication as a part of corporate governance standards and ethical conduct. That is not all; email archiving has also become a necessity for business success. Here are some advantages of archiving emails.

Reduce Storage Costs

Every day thousands of new email are
received and sent from business organizations. Looking at the importance of
email communication, deleting an email is not an option. It means organizations
would be required to purchase enterprise storage solutions which are quite
expensive.

Besides upgrading IT infrastructure, organizations are also required to maintain these systems. When you employ email archiving solutions, older email is archived in the cloud which frees space on your email server.

Though emails do not reside on the
company’s network server, it does not affect end-user in any way. A user with
access permissions can easily find the required mail from the archive without
any difficulty. Thus, using email archiving solutions does away with the need to
buy enterprise storage solutions thereby reducing storage costs.

Prevents Loss of Data

Data is important for every business
organization to study, research, further analysis and make informed decisions.
Loss of data can prevent businesses from taking informed decision and might
also invite penalties from regulatory authorities and government.

Users can delete emails unknowingly or
maliciously between two backups of emails. Some users may empty their inbox
before leaving the organization. In that case, the deleted mail and the data
stored or attached to it is lost forever. You can prevent this by employing an
email archiving solution that archives every copy of mail received and sent by
your organization.

Improve Server Performance

When you use email archiving solution,
older mail can be moved out of the live environment. The management can create
rule-based permission to access archived email. With mail moved out, you can
safely delete emails from the mail server which reduces the load on the email
server thereby improving its performance.

Simplified Backup and Restore

Email archiving is a bit different than
email backup. In email backups, old email backups are replaced by new email
backups. In email archiving, old email is stored securely. The new email is
added to the storage of old emails. You can read emails from the archive but
cannot modify or delete them.

The email archiving solution captures
mail content while it is downloaded to the mail server and also from the mail
application. This eliminates the need to take backups of email manually.
Restoring selected emails from the backup is difficult. However, you can easily
search for emails in the archive and restore selected emails.

Eliminates the Need for PST Files

Email backups are generally stored as PST
files that can become corrupt and make restoration process difficult or impossible.
Email archiving solution allows you to import PST files and search for emails.
Thus, they eliminate the need for email backup and PST files.

Helps Meet Compliance

Many industries and sectors have certain
regulatory and compliance rules associated with data and communication.
Businesses are required to secure email communication and data and also ensure
they can be retrieved in the future when needed.

Email archiving solutions are almost
tamper-proof. First, you have complete control of data access permissions. Only
an authorized person can access the data but cannot alter or delete it. Even IT
professionals in your organization cannot remove emails from the archive.

In email archives, the data and
communication threads are stored securely far away from the prying eyes of
competitors, scammers, and hackers. This ensures businesses are always
compliant with rules related to securing data and communication.

Accelerate Search Capabilities

Most archiving solutions offer basic
search and retrieval functions. however, some advanced archiving solutions
allow you to search for mail by sender, date, recipient, attachments, words in
subject or attachment thereby reducing the time required to find desired mail.

The benefits of email archiving go beyond
the advantages listed here. It goes without saying an email archiving solution
is critical for business success.
Do you know any other
advantages of email archiving? Please feel free to comment.